Monday, 31 March 2014

This year
we have been invited to go and play with the Dutch at Schipluiden near Delft.
We are re-creating a battle of 1574. I have neither time nor money to make a
wholly new outfit, so it is a matter of repurposing what I already own. Having
looked at some 1570s Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, especially by Pieter Aertsen
(1508 -1575), Pieter Pietersz (1540-1603)
and Joachim Beuckelaer (1533–1574) I decided on something that would make me look
vaguely period.

I took my
1640s madder red wool waistcoat and petticoat, which were two separate
garments, and sewed the bodice to the skirt to hide the tabs. The bodice does
not lace, it has hooks and eyes up the front, but some surviving garments
of this period hook and eye at the centre front, the underbodice of Eleonora of
Toledo (1562) and the gown of the Pfalzgrafin Dorothea Sabina (1598) for
example, also the lady in red in Beuckelaer’s
Air of 1570 appears to have hooked together her jacket at the top and left
the rest of it loose.

1640s tabs sewn inside skirt to hide them

My 1640s neckline
is low and square, and the sleeves gathered at the back. What was needed was a
partlet. I had some navy wool left over from an outfit I made for Roger longer
ago than I care to think about, just enough for a partlet, and enough linen to
line it. I made it to look similar to that in Aertsen’s 1567 Market
Woman and in Pietersz’s Pancake
Baker.

Head wear
also had to be taken into consideration. Many of the coifs in the paintings
appear to be quite complex. Women, certainly of my age, wore some form of linen
covering on the head. I opted to go with the simple English coif made from one
piece of fabric with shaping to the forehead and cheeks - on the grounds that I
already own one. In design it is like one of several in the Victoria and Albert
Museum, but without the embroidery. Many of the women in the paintings wear
a straw hat; Aertsen’s 1567 Market
Woman again, the woman in the background of Van Valckenborch’s Summer of 1595
or in his Vegetable
Market. So I dug out a simple straw hat in a vaguely similar style.

Next a
basket. I usually carry a rush basket for 1640s, but most of those I saw in the
paintings were wicker, two in this market
scene by Aertsen. So I dug out an out wicker basket I own that looked similiar.

I look vaguely 1570s, though it is probably not what I would have produced if I were starting from scratch.

Friday, 21 March 2014

Had an excellent study day in Bristol, provided by the West
of England Costume Society, entitled Dressing the little dears, and covering
children’s wear from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Ninya with the Tudor Tailor display

Our first speakers were Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya
Mikhaila from the Tudor Tailor, ably
assisted by their live model, Ninya’s daughter Minnie Perry. Their presentation
Counting cuffs and analysing aprons, was subtitled a statistical approach to
children’s dress in the sixteenth century. Much of the information was drawn
from their recently published book The Tudor Child. They
had, in order to get their information, trawled through nearly 16,000 wills
with over 30,000 bequests of clothing, only 357 of which were for children, and
vast numbers of images, limited to north west Europe. They spoke about
swaddling, and once the babes were a little older, half swaddling, where their
arms were free. Lacking a real baby, they are notorious uncooperative, they had
a baby sized baby doll you could use to practice swaddling. There was much talk
of “slavering clouts” that is bibs. They then moved on to small children, and
the problems of guessing the gender of the child, with coats for boys and gowns
for girls. Minnie was dressed in an outfit copied in part from a child on the Oglander family
monument, with a kirtle on top of her smock, and a russet gown over her
kirtle. The book is recommended.(Huggett and Mikhaila, 2013)

Second speaker was Noreen Marshall, who was previously a
curator at the Bethnal Green
Museum of Childhood. Her talk, What will baby wear, covered the history of
baby clothes and started with the sixteenth century. She too spoke about
swaddling, noting that the bands were quite deep 2-4 inches, and she had a
photograph of a 1575-1600
band from the collection. Noreen talked about chrisoms, the cloth that was
used when the child was christened, and how these do not survive. Chrisom
children were those who died within the first month. Noreen stated that the
ppins used for swaddling were normal open ended pins, and layette
pincushions with the pinheads spelling out mottos such as “welcome sweet
babe” were common presents for new mothers. Noreen showed a christening
set dating to 1650-1700 which consisted of a cap, forehead cloth, bib and
mittens, heavily decorated with lace, and a bearing
cloth of about the same date, which she described as small tablecloth size.
We moved on through 18th and 19th century christening
robes to the revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Terry for nappies appeared at the end of the 19th
century, and we were shown a pilcher (nappy cover) of circa 1909 in oiled silk,
creating an early waterproof.Liberty
bodices were introduced in 1908, with a wrapover style by the 1920s.
Barracoats made their appearance as open garments in the 19th
century but a closed
style by the 20th century. Romper
suits appear for older children from around 1900, but were being used for
babies by 1925.

Examples from Alasdair Peebles collection

After lunch collector Alasdair Peebles talked about Suitable
dress for boys, examining the boy’s suit not only with illustrations, but with
examples from his collection and covering from 1770 to the 1940s. He started
with photographs of a 1770s suit he had purchased when Brooklyn Museum
deaccessioned some of their collection. He then looked at the nankeen skeleton
suit of unbleached cotton (far left in the photograph). This style was worn
from the 1780s to the 1820s. The breeches button to the jacket. Next a tunic
suit (second from left in the photo), these were popular in the 1830s. Next
came a suit based on the pattern of the French Zouave uniforms, an original
survives in the Chicago
History Museum. The outfit Alasdair owns (second from right in the photo),
is not as flamboyant as the Chicago example, but is of similar cut. The boy’s
sailor suit needs no introduction. The young Prince Albert Edward
was famously painted wearing this style in 1848, the original is in the National Maritime Museum. Alasdair explained how those that have
survived are mainly from the 1920s and are of cotton jean, wool versions having
succumbed to moth. Alasdair then produced a little kilt suit, which
unfortunately I did not photograph. These were popular in the 1880s and 1890s.
He wondered why it had little black rosettes on the kilt, but no one was able
to offer an explanation. He then moved on to the Norfolk suit, which by 1900 was
ubiquitous, but survivals of children’s versions are now incredibly rare. Finally
Alasdair looked at the Eton
suit, worn in private schools until the 1930s or later, and comprising
black coat and waistcoat, striped trousers, stiffened collar and top hat.

A Ladybird dressing, which someone gave to our speaker.

Our
final speaker was social anthropologist Dr. Kaori O’Connor, who some people may
have seen recently on the Great British Sewing Bee talking about how Lycra
changed fashion. Her talk was entitled The Ladybird, the dressing gown and a
golden age of British childhood. Kaori spoke about how the comfortable, safe,
secure image of the child’s dressing gown was formed in the inter war years by
things like images of listening
to radio stories with Uncle Mac, and the Ovaltineys. In 1932 Eric Pasold,
whose family had a long running textile manufacturing business on the
continent, established the British base in Langley. The firm specialised in
machine knit garments and at the beginning was mostly producing underwear.
During the war the factory went over to producing parachutes. Kaori pointed out
that during the Second World War dressing gowns were an item of clothing that
was not produced. After the war Eric decided on a new label for children,
Ladybird, and he started with the underwear and with the dressing gown. Eric
also produced a book about his family’s story The
Legend of the Scarlet Ladybird, and a strip for the comic Swift
entitled The
Sign of the Scarlet Ladybird. In the stories Ladybird clothes, such as tee
shirts, help to get the children out of trouble or scrapes. When fashions for
children stared to change in the 1960s Pasold sold out to Coats Patons, who
continued to market the Ladybird range.

Monday, 10 March 2014

The
portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1607–1685) by Rembrandt van Rijn was painted in
1657 when the subject was fifty. It is often considered one of the finest Dutch
portraits of the seventeenth century, and at the moment it is on loan to the
Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.(Brown, 2014) The portrait belongs
to the Penrhyn Estates, and is usually on display at Penrhyn Castle, which is now owned by the
National Trust.

Catrina
Hooghsaet was a Mennonite, as the Anabaptist denominations that followed the
preachings of Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland were called. Catrina
belonged to the Waterland congregation in Amsterdam. Rembrandt’s relationship
with the Waterland congregation has been discussed and summarised by several
historians. (Edmonds, 2009). As well as Catrina,
Rembrandt had already painted other members of the congregation, in 1632 Aeltje Uylenburgh (his wife Saskia’s aunt), and in
1641 Cornelius Anslo and his wife.

The copy
of the portrait I have used here is from Wikimedia Commons and is not as good,
or as detailed as that available on the National Museum of Wales website. So looking at the clothing in
the portrait, what effect does her being Mennonite have? The Mennonites, like
the Quakers in England about the same time, talked about plain dress, but plain
did not mean poor quality. Catrina was a rich woman and can be seen dressed in
the finest silk and linen, but with little embellishment. The cut is very
fashionably for 1657, Interestingly at this point in time Catrina was separated
from her second husband, Hendrick Jacobsz, who was a
crimson dyer and clothier, and also a preacher.(Anon., 2014)(van Gelder, 2014)

So her
clothing follows the cut and style of fashionable dress, but it is plain.
Compare this portrait with that of an unknown woman of the same decade by Jan
Victors, which is in the Milwalkee Art Museum. The dress is the same cut and
style, but the collar and cuffs in the Victors portrait have wide lace trim,
and the centre front of the skirt has gold braid, while the bodice also shows a
gold colour of the garment underneath at the centre front. Catrina has the same
black bands across her bodice, but they are difficult to discern as the
undergarment is also black.

Catrina’s only jewellery is a ring on the
little finger of her left hand. While the unknown woman, as well as a ring on
her left hand, has a gold necklace with matching bracelets on both wrists, a
large broach holds her collar together at the front, and she has pearl
earrings. Both women are wearing black silk with white linen, but then black
and white had been both fashionable and common in the Netherlands for the
previous sixty years. Fynes Morison stated when he travelled there in 1592-3,
“Women ... cover their heads with a coyfe of fine holland linnen cloth, and
they weare gowns commonly of some slight stuffe, and for the most part of black
colour.”

Catrina’s
coif, a close up can be seen here, appears to be more
elaborate and has a greater degree of decoration than that of the unknown
woman, though in both cases it can be seen that the headdresses are held in position by hooftijsertgen or
oorijzer
(ear irons). An example of the sort of
coif worn by the woman painted by Victors survives in the Platt Hall collection.

Feyntje van Steenkiste by Hals. 1632

Catrina
holds in her right hand a handkerchief decorated with akertjes (tassels of
knotted linen cords), this is an item that was permitted by the Mennonites. Catrina
could have had lace on her handkerchiefs as the 1640 inventory of another Mennonite,
Feyntje van Steenkiste (painted
by Hals in 1632), shows that eight of her handkerchiefs had bobbin lace
edgings and nine were of silk. (Dumortier, 1989)Tassels also decorate
Catrina’s collar, these were quite common. Another Dutch lady from the 1650’s,
painted by Abraham Liedts and now in Manchester City
Galleries, has similar tassels on her collar.

So
Mennonite dress plain, unadorned, but of the best quality you could afford.